The RMIT Centre for Urban Research is delighted to announce the appointment of urban health expert Associate Professor Hannah Badland to the role of Deputy Director.
Awarded a Vice-Chancellor Senior Research Fellowship in 2017, Badland is a leading academic in the healthy liveable cities space focusing on how the built environment is connected to health, wellbeing and inequities in adults and children internationally.
Her research has spanned projects looking into remote sensing technologies, child independent mobility and travel behaviours in diverse settings.
A Chief Investigator for the Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health, Badland is currently mapping the inequities of health, social, economic and environmental circumstances of Australians with and without disabilities over time and between areas.
She will be delivering a world-first comprehensive monitoring framework to identify policy issues.
Recently awarded a three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project grant, Badland is also investigating and identifying how policy interventions related to parents’ mental health, preschool programs, and the built environment can be optimised to reduce inequities in children’s mental, academic, and physical health outcomes.
She will work with colleagues and collaborators from the University of Melbourne, ANU,
Monash, UNSW, and Loughborough to deliver the project Child health and developmental inequalities: Evidence for precision policy.
In addition to this, Badland has been working with Bangkok city planners to tackle liveability challenges facing the Thai capital to help guide innovative solutions for liveability challenges.
Her project Measuring, monitoring, and translating urban liveability in Bangkok, follows the successful pilot project which developed an urban liveability framework for Bangkok’s context.
In 2018, Badland was awarded the prestigious Thinker in Residence by the Australian Health Promotion Association for her contributions to health promotion.
As part of her residence, Badland contributed to the ongoing conversation around health promotion, social determinants of health and equity.
Story: Chanel Koeleman
